Rails web hosting - spam email policy

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi folks,

I'm looking for some advice about Rails hosting. I've looked at: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RailsWebHosts

I'm building a site where users link up with their friends, and exchange information with them. I'd like for users to be able to invite their friends to join the site, and for the site to send out an invitation email.

I found a great deal with Site5 - shared hosting for $5 per month with 5TB of bandwidth. However, my interpretation of their email policy is that any email not solicited by the recipient is spam, and may lead to termination of the account.

I'm after advice if this is a common policy among hosting companies, and whether my plan to send emails as suggested by their friends is unrealistic. I can see that a user of the site could abuse this feature to send spam, even if my intentions are honorable. However, existing sites such as LinkedIn would seem to have the same risk, yet they do provide this facility.

Any advice is appreciated.

Regards, Chris

2

Chris,

Rules like this are in place so web hosts can get rid of spammers. If you are not sending large amounts of emails then you shouldn't have anything to worry about. One thing to keep in mind is that is is standard practice on shared hosting servers to limit the amount of outgoing emails per hour to 200-300. If you think you are going to be sending out more emails than that, then you might want to consider a VPS instead.

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On top of what Joe said,

The main reason for this is shared hosts usually use a shared IP for the majority of it's customers. A spam complaint to hotmail.com, for example will blacklist that IP, causing everyone trying to send to hotmail.com to fail. It can take weeks to months to remove a blacklisted IP.

Another problem is server load. Sending bulk email takes time from other customers sharing your server.

Lastly, Spam doesn't just mean bulk email. As far as I know, if it does not have an opt out link, and a double opt in, it is considered by most companies to be spam.

There is another solution, you could write your app to stagger emails, so that only so many are sent out per hour.

-- Jarod

Joe Clarke wrote:

4

Hi Chris,

Chris wrote:

Hi folks,

I'm looking for some advice about Rails hosting. I've looked at: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RailsWebHosts

I'm building a site where users link up with their friends, and exchange information with them. I'd like for users to be able to invite their friends to join the site, and for the site to send out an invitation email.

I found a great deal with Site5 - shared hosting for $5 per month with 5TB of bandwidth. However, my interpretation of their email policy is that any email not solicited by the recipient is spam, and may lead to termination of the account.

I'm after advice if this is a common policy among hosting companies, and whether my plan to send emails as suggested by their friends is unrealistic. I can see that a user of the site could abuse this feature to send spam, even if my intentions are honorable. However, existing sites such as LinkedIn would seem to have the same risk, yet they do provide this facility.

Any advice is appreciated.

Regards, Chris

try this page: http://rails.rainbowpurple.com/rails-hosting

Yeah different webhosts have different policies.

I suspect larger webhosts will be more "prone" to these policies. I.e. they won't care enough when detecting a policy, and may terminate/suspend your account without prior warning or notice, etc.

Smaller or specialized webhosts, I think, won't be as ruthless. Usually they'll notice you if they suspect anything, not simply pull the plug.

Some webhosts, like hostingrails.com, that I also use, make a limit of 200 e-mails per hour. This is a nice way of compromise between spam vs. legit. 4800 e-mails per day isn't gonna make spam companies happy :slight_smile: These webhosts would suggest plugins such as ar_sendmail to send e-mails in batches to be nice with this limit.

I'd suggest using EngineYard.com if you're serious, check out their "what do you get" page for info. Their support is also excellent. Tell them I refer you and you'll get significant discount (e-mail me for details :slight_smile:

Good luck Chris! :slight_smile: